author:fcfromssc a massive, distributed search for the best way to hurt the outgroup as badly as
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
your dire, ever-postponed predictions
My prediction has been for some time now that the culture war will continue to escalate until we either find a way to leave each other alone, or until violence and chaos become self-sustaining. I do not think this prediction has been postponed, and I think the developments of the last four years have born that prediction out quite well. Our current society is still best described as a massive, distributed search for ways to hurt the outgroup as badly as possible without getting in too much trouble, and that search is observably advancing over time. If you disagree, give me the metrics by which you judge social cohesion, peace and prosperity to be increasing, and we can discuss it.
your proposed solutions
Which of my proposed solutions do you object to, specifically?
The woke have largely backed down from their most extreme positions during the summer of george, on BLM riots, covid restrictions, metoo nonsense, DEI, etc.
In what sense?
Race riots and zero-sum racial politics did not start with BLM. They ruined numerous major cities across the US in the 60s and 70s. They devastated the black community of LA in the 90s, blighting it for decades after due to the lingering economic and social effects. And after that mess, Clinton was supposed to have laid the issue to rest with his sista soulja moment, and then Obama was supposed to have paved the grave over for good with his two terms. And yet here we are, No Justice, No Peace, same as it ever was. Antifa-style gangs are still rioting in Blue strongholds, and their criminal violence is still being ignored, excused and actively enabled by major Blue institutions. Blues generally have moved to openly endorsing the murder of rival politicians, and we're seeing the normalization of straightforward political assassination. We're right back to the Days of Rage, because nothing actually changed.
Blues are on the back foot because we Reds dealt them a crippling and humiliating electoral defeat, and we're currently capitalizing on our victory by attacking their infrastructure directly. There's still several dozen million of them, and while the institutions they control are clearly in decline, they still wield considerable power and influence. There's going to be another election in a year, and then another presidential election two years after that, and there's no reason to believe that Progressivism will not come roaring back the moment they regain significant political power. All we have done they will attempt to undo, and they will aim to maximize the damage to our institutions in turn while the power is theirs. We're going after their institutions because we fundamentally do not believe the people running those institutions have changed their minds, and we are not confused about their approach to the wielding of political power.
BLM riots, covid restrictions, metoo/affirmative consent, DEI and so on are expressions of the contradictions within the Blue worldview. Those contradictions will keep right on expressing themselves whenever and wherever Blues secure power, and usually in these same forms or in forms very similar to them.
You did say you were going to coerce me, or else the woke (earlier you) would coerce me.
"Previous Me" was a standard-issue tits and beer liberal who believed strongly that coercion was unnecessary; I, like most of the other tits-and-beer liberals, was driven out of the Left when our erstwhile allies decided that free speech and tolerance were for pussies, actually, and that Liberals Got The Bullet Too. I now recognize that some level of coercion is necessary, because I've personally seen how the vacuum collapses, and how the supposed Liberal safeguards against such a collapse failed.
If you believe that people like me are just as bad as the Progressives, or perhaps worse, then go live with the Progressives and see how that goes. Either way, you need to accept that naive liberalism is not sustainable, and will inevitably decay.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3mo ago
edit: well, OP changed substantially after I hit post.
Sorry, it's a bad habit. This still seems like a really good reply, though, and I'll try to get a substantive response.
One note, real quick. The quote is:
The last several years are best modelled as a massive, distributed search for ways to hurt the outgroup as badly as possible without getting in too much trouble.
It's like "A Tribe Called Quest", you have to say the whole thing. I try to keep the phrasing as consistent as possible, I've been using it for years now because I think it's a really important insight.
Because it's boring and cheap.
Calling for it is definitely boring and cheap. An actual collapse of civil order would be a lot of things, but "boring" and "cheap" are not among them. If you think that our current order would obviously have survived Trump catching the Butler bullet with his brainstem, you are much more of an optimist than I. I believe that a lot of Americans were genuinely disappointed that the bullets only killed and wounded his supporters and not Trump himself. Would you disagree?
The taboo on organized political violence has been steadily degrading for at least the last decade. We've had multiple presidential and federal assassination attempts within the last few years, numerous politically-motivated shootings, and at least one politically-motivated spree-killing of children. This would be catastrophic if the capacity for organized violence were a constant in the equation, and only the willingness were increasing. And in fact, the commenter above fervently believes this, as do most people, and so is actively working to maximize the willingness variable. And on the flipside, most people discounting the possibility of a serious collapse are likewise assuming capacity as a constant and reasoning from there.
He and all others who share this perspective are deceived. Not only is capacity a variable, it is a variable freighted by a massive overhang of untapped potential energy. The last several years are best modelled as a massive, distributed search for the best ways to hurt the outgroup as badly as possible without getting in too much trouble. The further the culture war escalates, the more motivated the search. If nothing changes, that search is very likely to, within the next few years, return results that are unsurvivable for our present society.
I wrote a far-too-long reply, and then lost it to an internet outage. hopefully this one will work better.
....Existence proven. That is quite the article; I haven't made it through the whole thing, and it took a while to get further than the subheader. @gattsuru, you might get a kick out of this. I might try and do a writeup for it.
The last several years are best modelled as a massive, distributed search for ways to hurt the outgroup as badly as possible without getting in too much trouble. It is not this way because someone commissioned a search of how to maximize evil, it is this way because the search is simply the sum of our collective desires. We want it to be this way more than we want it to be some other way. We are, at the end of the day, only human.
Over the last two years in particular, I think we have an abundance of solid evidence that both sides of the culture war are headless, and that no one is to any meaningful extent "in control" of the mechanisms driving the conflict. It's all paths of least resistance, incentive gradients, water flowing to the sea. Ukraine and Russia can keep cute cafes and nightclubs running fifty klicks behind the front because they are two cohesive cultures fighting an actual war centrally-directed between them, not the corpse of a formerly-cohesive culture undergoing increasingly rapid decay. We are sewn up together inside this corpse, and will likely claw each others' guts out trying to escape it. We have no front to hide behind and so everywhere is the front, and the fight is exponentially more chaotic.
The people publicly cheering Kirk's death appear to be core Progressive cadre: lots of teachers, health-care professionals, intellectuals and academics. I'm skeptical that the Democratic party or Blue Tribe more generally can actually sideline these people, much less change their minds. What can and likely will be done is to try to get them to shut up and stop scaring the hos; I think additional five-minutes-hates like this are unlikely, because the lesson learned here will be that this permutation gets you in too much trouble, so keep the murder but more plausible deniability is needed. I think this will mostly be accomplished through vibe transmission, largely subconscious, maybe through a couple essays or think-pieces crystalizing things for the slower among us.
I get that. What you seem to be arguing is that a couple years ago, support for riots increased and then decreased, and this time it's support for assassins that's increasing and then will decrease, but overall the total level of violence stays roughly equal, right?
I don't buy it. The floyd riots represented a huge increase in violence, far beyond the baseline of the post-70s decades. They were unsustainable, and so they were not sustained, and now that increased tribal appetite for violence finds new channels to flow down... but it seems to me that it is concentrating and accellerating. In the Floyd years, even in CHAZ, political killings were mostly opportunistic or impulsive, and support for them was mainly drawn from support for the riots as a whole, or from after-the-fact damage control rationalizations. Now we're seeing targeted ambush murders, with broad-based incitement and encouragement beforehand and explicit celebration afterward. That seems like a change that should worry us.
If I understand it correctly, your further argument is that in the 60s-70s, there were a bunch of other forms of conflict that were much more worrying, and we don't have those now. That's true; the Russian Collusion hoax aside, there's no hostile foreign power either tribe can ally with, and most of our foreign entanglements have been bipartisan. On the other hand we aren't the America that went into the 60s and 70s either. We're short many institutions and norms and a shedload of social cohesion, and the violence, again, is not actually coming from the fringes in any meaningful sense any more. My model is that an outright majority of Blues would be happy to see Trump murdered. That model is, I think, shared by most of Red Tribe, and we form our plans and actions based on that understanding.
Zimmerman did recieve significant Red Tribe support (although notably I don't remember anyone celebrating Martin's death), but he claimed lawful self-defense and was acquitted of his charges in court. I'm willing to agree that some verdicts are wrong; I strongly object to Angela Davis' acquittal, for example, but I would not agree that the killing was clearly lawless.
By contrast, I would agree that Drejka's shooting of McGlockton and the McMichaels' shooting of Arbery were pretty clearly lawless killings. Both cases were attempts at self-defense, but in both cases the shooter made errors in judgement that compromised the validity of their self-defense claim. Drejka recieved no support that I'm aware of; the McMichaels recieved some minimal support.
Compare these three cases to Karmelo Anthony, Luigi, and now Robinson. That's one apparent impulse murder and two premeditated ambush murders, none with even a shred of a claim to self-defense or any lawful basis for the killing. All three have received appalling levels of support from Blue Tribe broadly.
I am not seeing an equivalence here. Red Tribe supported Zimmerman and Rittenhouse also because we thought they were legitimately innocent and had acted in self-defense, and Drejka and the McMichaels we wrote off because they broke the rules, even if only in marginal and technical ways. No one cheering Robinson or Luigi or donating to Anthony is under the impression that what they did was justifiable legally, or that the illegality of the acts derives from the legal fine-print. They are celebrating the fact that their tribe can collectively flout the law, as they did in the riots as well.
Do not confuse this for an argument that we Reds are not entirely willing and capable of coordinating similar violence; the difference is who we've generally aimed it at ("Are those Level Four plates?", "I didn't lose shit", "belt-feds are the only good feds", "the tree of liberty", etc), and the fact that we have drawn and enforced lines that keeps such lawless killing almost entirely (and, arguably, comically) theoretical.
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